Iraq's Kurdistan region threatened on Monday to stop oil exports, and argued the central government did not have the right to sign a deal with British firm BP to develop a giant oilfield in disputed land.The moves were the latest in a long-running dispute over energy contracts and revenues between Baghdad and the autonomous region, with the two sides…
Jihadists are moving from Iraq to Syria, as are weapons being sent to opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime, Iraq's deputy interior minister told AFP on Saturday.Assad has been carrying out a bloody crackdown on an uprising against his rule since March 2011, in which over 6,000 people have been killed."We have intelligence inf…
The Iraqi political bloc led by anti-American Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has issued a call to dissolve Iraq's parliament and hold early elections, in a move that could escalate the country's growing sectarian crisis. The Sadrists said Monday that new elections are the only way to resolve Iraq's deepening political problems because the…
SADRISTANBUL—Kurdish militants killed at least 24 Turkish soldiers on Turkey's border with Iraq early Wednesday, in one of the deadliest attacks since the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, began its armed campaign almost 30 years ago.Turkish special forces crossed into northern Iraq in hot pursuit of the guerrillas, while the air force bombed Iraqi territory…
Police in southern California have arrested 60 people and broken up an Iraqi criminal ring accused of selling drugs, machine guns and improvised bombs out of an immigrant social club, authorities said on Thursday.The swoop by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and local police targeted a network operating out of El Cajon, which is near San Diego and…
By Reva BhallaSomething extraordinary, albeit not unexpected, is happening in the Persian Gulf region. The United States, lacking a coherent strategy to deal with Iran and too distracted to develop one, is struggling to navigate Iraq’s fractious political landscape in search of a deal that would allow Washington to keep a meaningful military presence in t…
Iranian state television ran a report Monday saying Israeli military aircraft were massing at a U.S. air base in Iraq for a strike on Iran.Israel said it had no knowledge of such a strike plan, as reported on the website of Iran's English-language Press TV, and Iraq's air force commander denied the report. The Pentagon dismissed it as "ridicul…
BAGHDAD – Gunmen attacked Iraq's largest oil refinery before dawn Saturday, killing a guard and forcing a shutdown that threatened to exacerbate acute electricity shortages that have prompted violent protests.The gunmen detonated bombs that sparked a fire and forced the facility to halt operations, officials said. A few hours later, a small refinery i…
By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass…
LONDON – The WikiLeaks website is poised to release what the Pentagon fears is the largest cache of secret U.S. documents in history — hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports that could amount to a classified history of the war in Iraq.U.S. officials said Friday they were racing to contain the damage from the imminent release, while NATO's top o…